Chindata Group Holdings Limited was awarded the Data Center Design and Construction Award at the 2023 Datacloud Global Awards for the Taihang Mountain Energy and Information Technology Industrial Campus of the Pan-Beijing Area in China.
The campus is expected to be fully operational by 2025, with a total IT capacity of over 500 MW and can carry more than 1 million servers. After the completion of a final central station, it will become the largest new-age hyperscale data centre industrial park in the Asia-Pacific Region. The success of the campus can be attributed to the Group's focus on green energy, modular prefabrication innovations, and energy-saving technology.
Chindata have managed to reduce pollution and excessive waste during on-site construction. This furthers Chindata’s mission to usher in the next generation of eco-friendly data centres. By harnessing the advantages of environmentally minded design, Chindata have managed to also reap benefits in production efficiency. In comparison to traditional civil engineering, build time was accelerated by 30%, and construction costs were reduced by 10% per IT MW.
The campus also marked the premier of several innovative technologies. Of these, the most crucial was wide-scale composite evaporative cooling technology. Composite evaporative cooling uses sub-wet bulb water supply technology and a high-water temperature wind wall-end technology. With real-time mechanical supplementary cooling technology to meet the needs of air-cooled high-power density servers, composite evaporative cooling supports up to 35 kW/single cabinet.
Chindata is the first third-party data centre company in China to employ widescale evaporative cooling units, the deployment scale exceeds 200MW, while maintaining an annual PUE as low as 1.17. And water wastage was reduced by 70% compared with traditional chilled water systems.
Some data halls of the campus adopt immersion liquid cooling technology, achieving 100% natural cooling source operation with a PUE lower than 1.10. The campus also meets deployment requirements of ultra-high power density servers，supporting 60 kW per cabinet of computer power operation。At the same time, customers benefit from lower energy consumption, lower IT equipment cooling costs, and lower carbon emissions.
The waterless cooling technology adopts the pump-drive phase change technology, fluorine pump technology, and oil-free centrifugal compression. With no length limitations, a fluorine pump can achieve an optimal pressure ratio without creating mechanical wear. This effectively solves problems created by traditional fluorine pump air conditioners. Usually, varying tube lengths and height restrictions can cause oil return difficulties. By using a back-panel wind wall instead of a cabinet back-panel, we achieve near-end cooling that also saves energy. It also creates a hot channel within the cabinet, addressing backplane redundancy problems and improving system reliability.
Several other innovative technologies adopted in the campus are:
Heat recovery technology uses a water ring heat pump unit to recover part of the heart energy dissipated into the water system. Once the water temperature reaches 60°C, warm air re-enters the system and heats the campus. This also ensures our heating is self-sufficient, which saves on heat costs while reducing power and water consumption of the water-cooling system. This leads to an increased cooling effect on the machine room, reducing overall emissions.
High-density, reliable, smart lithium batteries were another crucial innovation. The battery adopts active current-sharing technology，allows for current sharing control, charging and discharging currents on each string of cells. To quantify this, it reduces the flow rate from 20% to 2%. With this freed-up energy, it is possible to create parallel connections between different battery voltages, different cell numbers, different capacity batteries, and more. Redundancy is reduced and reliability is improved, making this another key aspect of this data centre’s construction.
Deployment of modular design, the entire data centre park adopts a single-story frame structure, no longer relying on using the traditional pipeline hanging form, while also reducing the steel usage in the secondary structure.
The Taihang Mountain Energy and Information Technology Industrial Campus is the first green data centre in Shanxi Province; and was on the list of “List of Typical Cases of National New Data Centers 2021”, cited as a model for green, low-carbon data centres. It also won first prize of Carbon Neutral Data Centers initiated by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and the Press Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. In 2021, the average PUE value base was as low as 1.16, and the data centre itself had been using 100% renewable energy for three consecutive years.